Our ESG objectives include the following:
- Reduce our global environmental footprint
- Maintain a socially responsible and ethically sourced supply chain
- Prioritize the health and safety of our global workforce
- Advance equity, diversity and inclusion at our company and within the community
- Develop programs and reporting for ongoing improvement
Environment
MaxLinear takes our common stewardship of the environment seriously. We believe human activities are causing climate change, and that we, and global society, must do our part to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5ºC as called for in the Paris Agreement. Among other things, we monitor our global environmental footprint, both directly and indirectly, and in our development efforts, our engineers are consistently focused on improving the power efficiency and thermal performance of our chips, minimizing water consumption and waste, promoting recycling of reusable materials, and providing customer satisfaction through compliance with global environmental regulations as they relate to our products and operations. We are committed to contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and we are currently taking measures to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact such as purchasing 100% renewable energy for our facilities in California and elsewhere where available, using key suppliers that focus on sustainability as described below, enhancing our offices with energy saving improvements, and transitioning away from one-time use plastics used in the office to sustainable reusable products. We are currently assessing additional measures to further reduce our emissions we plan to set formal targets for reducing emissions in 2024.
As a fabless semiconductor design company, we do not manufacture our products and, with respect to the activities we conduct directly, we believe we leave a limited environmental footprint. With respect to our indirect environmental impact, we monitor the practices of our foundry partners and believe that each of them has made a public commitment to integrate sustainability and sensitivity to environmental impact into their manufacturing processes. For example, three of our largest manufacturing partners, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Intel Corporation, and United Microelectronics Corporation, each maintain well-developed environmental management and sustainability programs that are publicly avowed and supported by the highest levels of management within those organizations. We aim to have a majority of manufacturing partners that are certified with ISO 14001 international standards for environmental management systems and plan to launch manufacturing partner audits in the future. We also participate in recycling of integrated circuits and boards. Additionally, our products are compliant with the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) standards in the European Union (EU).
Greenhouse Gas (GHG) CO2 Emissions & Energy Usage
MaxLinear recognizes the importance of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and its impact to the environment across our value chain. We have evaluated and continue to analyze direct and indirect emissions from our business activities, supply chain and product lifecycle. The majority of our Scope 1 and Scope 2 GHG emissions is comprised of Purchased Electricity. We actively look for ways to use more renewable energy across locations and lower overall energy consumption. In the baseline year of calculating GHG emissions, we have also found that the largest driver of our emissions is the Scope 3 category of Purchased Good and Services as we are a fabless designer of integrated circuits. As we build our GHG emissions history, we will analyze opportunities to reduce our overall emissions. In addition, we aim to set long-term goals for GHG emission reduction. In the meantime, we are actively reducing our emissions by purchasing 100% renewable energy in locations where it is available, primarily for our three California locations: Irvine, Carlsbad, San Jose.
Our GHG emissions and energy usage throughout MaxLinear locations is as follows*:
| Energy and Emissions Summary | 2022 (Coming Soon) |
2021 |
| Energy Usage | ||
| Energy Use - Total (GWh) from Grid | 9.77 | |
| Energy Use - Percent from Grid | 100% | |
| Renewable Energy (GWh) | 2.06 | |
| Percent Renewable Energy | 21% | |
| Non-Renewable Energy (GWh) | 7.71 | |
| Percent Non-Renewable Energy | 79% | |
| GHG Emissions | ||
| Scope 1 (Direct) Emissions - CO2e (tonnes) | 324 | |
| CO2e (tonnes) | 123 | |
| CH4 (tonnes)*** | 0**** | |
| N2O (tonnes)*** | 0 | |
| HFCs | 201 | |
| Scope 2 - location based (Indirect, Electricity) - CO2e (tonnes) | 4,321 | |
| Scope 2 - market based (Indirect, Electricity) - CO2e (tonnes) | 3,857 | |
| Scope 3 (Categories 1, 2, 3, 6, 8)** - CO2e (tonnes) | 244,189 | |
| Category 1 - Purchased goods and services | 233,097 | |
| Category 2 - Capital goods | 7,614 | |
| Category 3 - Fuel-and energy-related activities | 2,924 | |
| Category 6 - Business travel | 259 | |
| Category 8 - Upstream leased assets | 294 | |
| Total CO2e (tonnes) - Scope 1, Scope 2 - market based & Scope 3 | 248,370 | |
*Electricity data from the below locations, which were not significant due to the size of the facilities, was not available. These locations were not included in Scope 2 Purchased Electricity nor Energy Usage; however, they are accounted for in Scope 3 Upstream Leased Assets.
• Austria
• Canada
• Germany
• Massachusetts, USA
• Oregon, USA
• Chennai, India
**As Scope 3 emissions are comprised of assets not owned or controlled by MaxLinear, we have compiled data for applicable categories where available. We continue to reach into our value chain to obtain additional information from our upstream and downstream counterparts. Our current Scope 3 data set consists of the below activities:
Category 1 - Purchased goods and services: Product inventory purchases; non-production related product purchases
Category 2 - Capital goods: Production photomasks
Category 3 - Fuel-and energy-related activities (not included in scope 1 or scope 2): Extraction, production, and transportation of consumed fuels and fuels consumed in electricity as well as generation of electricity that is lost in transmission and distribution
Category 6 - Business travel: Employee air travel; mileage reimbursement information between MaxLinear Carlsbad and Irvine offices
Category 8 - Upstream leased assets: Office leases utilized to estimate electricity for locations not accounted for in Scope 2 Purchased Electricity; such locations were not significant.
*** The other GHG emission factors were available only for US and Canada based locations.
**** Emission values displayed as 0 are less than 1 tonne.
Note: the GHG emissions are calculated based on the methodologies laid out in the GHG Protocol, as follows. GHG emissions were quantified per the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Semiconductors Standard and the ISO 14064-1:2006, Greenhouse gases - Part 1: Specification with guidance at the organization level for the quantification and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and removals. Emissions are reported for carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), and nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) from direct and indirect sources. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR4) global warming potentials (GWPs) were used to convert CH4 (25)and N2O (298) emissions to CO2e. The following GWPs were used for HFCs: R-410A: 2088] ; HFC-134A: 1,430. Emission are total gross global GHGs emitted to the atmosphere before accounting for offsets, credits, or other similar mechaisms that have reduced or compensated for emissions.
Note 1: Metric Codes: Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Semiconductors Standard TCSC Version 2018-10: TC-SC-130a.1; Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) 2016 302 Energy 302-1/11.1.2; CDP Climate Change 2022 Questionnaire C8 Energy C8.2
Note 2: Scope 2 footnote: Metric codes: SASB TC-SC110a-1, GRI 305 Emission 305-1/11.1.5, 11.1.6;CDP C6 Emissions Data C6.1, C6.2, C6.3, C6.4a, C6.5, CDP C7 Emissions Breakdown C7.1.
As noted above, we believe our products improve the quality of life for consumers around the world, mostly notably during the pandemic as we helped make possible the Internet backbone and infrastructure on which everyone relied for more than a year. On the other hand, the same infrastructure that made work-from-home and virtual parties a reality is a substantial user of our energy resources. To counter this adverse energy impact, we design our chips with specific objectives intended to reduce energy use by the end products in which they are incorporated.
The projected exponential growth of network data and data traffic generated and consumed by social media, on-demand streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, and data center and cloud-based services, the proliferation of interconnected appliances in the home, within industry, and by enterprises, frequently referred to as the “Internet of Things (IoT),” and the advent of the 4G/5G wireless mobile internet are each driving unprecedented growth in energy consumption. Our CMOS broadband, high-frequency analog and mixed-signal, digital system-on-chip (SoC) solutions have exceptional levels of functional integration that drastically reduce power consumption across a wide range of the broadband communications, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multi-market customer market applications. In the majority of these systems, overall power consumption can be ascribed to multiple transceivers in a system, each of which receives and amplifies weak data signals and conversely transmits strong data signals to other receivers while maintaining excellent signal quality. At our founding, we pioneered broadband high-frequency radio transceivers integrated with complete digital signal processing systems in CMOS on a single-die for televisions, cable data modems and video gateways – our products and technologies reduced power consumption of each transceiver function by a factor of 10 to 50. As a result, we believe that today’s worldwide annual shipment of 250 million televisions and cable data modems requires 40,000 Megawatts of less power generation annually than they would have otherwise needed in the absence of our innovations. These energy savings are equal to the total energy consumption needs of four megacities, each the size of New York. We continue to lead and pioneer technology innovations that advance our ability to achieve the highest levels of integration of all analog and radio-transceiver and digital signal processing functionality on the same chip, which drastically reduces power consumption by elimination of signal transitions between multiple discrete chips and subsystems in large high-volume data bandwidth energy intensive applications. These applications include cable, copper, and fiber-optic multi-gigabit data access modems for home; in-home data distribution using WiFi, MoCA, or G.hn wired connectivity technologies; 400/800 Gbps optical transceivers that connect cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) servers to switches and routers inside hyperscale data centers; 5G massive-MIMO antenna radio transceiver arrays in wireless base-stations; and wireless and optical transport networks that haul data traffic between connecting base-stations, data centers, and end user connections. By reducing the power consumption in these systems by an estimated two to fifty times the consumption under conventional approaches, we also simplify costly thermal designs that would otherwise be environmentally harmful by requiring bulky inefficient fans and other refrigeration systems.
We believe that in order to address many of the energy resource and environmental challenges facing the world, the pace of energy-efficiency innovation must outstrip the rate of increase in energy consumption by the data intensive communications applications on which we increasingly rely and which will continue to form the backbone of our evolution as a society. We are continuing to pioneer new technology and innovation through investments intended to develop monolithic or integrated power management and high-power regulation silicon products that transform the efficiency of power provisioning in electronic systems. Our continued innovation in power regulation and provisioning with “smart telemetry” will minimize idle-mode energy wastage and instead ration power in an application or system based on functional utilization versus today's mostly “Always ON” systems. We believe that our technology investments in power-regulation, power-provisioning, and power-telemetry will have a transformative beneficial impact on the energy needs of our interconnected world.
Socially responsible and ethically sourced supply chain
We are committed to the use of a socially responsible supply chain to reduce the risk of human rights violations and the use of conflict minerals (tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold, or 3TG) from the Democratic Republic of Congo and certain adjoining countries. We are committed to respecting internationally recognized human rights under the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Our efforts include maintaining an anti-slavery policy, and a business partner labor standards policy which bars the use of forced or child labor and slavery and a conflict minerals policy governing the use and distribution of 3TG minerals, as well as conducting due diligence before allowing a potential supplier to become a preferred supplier. We request the return of reporting forms related to conflict minerals from our suppliers under the Responsible Minerals Initiative, or RMI, Conflict Minerals Survey. We file an annual conflict minerals report (https://investors.maxlinear.com/). Further, we seek to remove any suppliers that continue to fail to meet our business partner labor standards and conflict minerals policies after being provided the opportunity to remedy non-compliance via implementation of a corrective action plan.
Health and Safety
Our ongoing focus on workplace safety and compliance to applicable regulations has enabled us to preserve business continuity while ensuring a safe work environment following the COVID-19 pandemic, with return to in-person work adhering to local health authority guidelines. A substantial portion of our workforce has been vaccinated against COVID-19. We also comply with applicable laws and regulations regarding workplace safety and are subject to audits by entities such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the United States. We are in the process of updating our injury and illness prevention policies.
Total Recordable Incident Rate. We track the total recordable incident rate in certain jurisdictions, where required by local rules. Our total recordable incident rate for such jurisdictions is as follows:
| Country | 2022 | 2021 |
| United States | 0.19% | 0.40% |
| Austria | 1.06% | 0% |
| Germany | 0.99% | 0% |
| Israel | 0.40% | 0% |
| Spain | 0.78% | 0% |
Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
We emphasize our core values of Excellence, People, Integrity, and Compassion (EPIC) in our hiring and human resources practices as well as our customer service. Our corporate culture, focused on providing employees with opportunities, based solely on individual excellence and initiative, was instilled by founders who represented highly diverse skill sets and origins but shared a common commitment. Of our ten founders, seven were born outside the United States, and eight are diverse.
Our future success depends on our ability to retain, attract, and motivate qualified personnel, especially our design and technical personnel, but also our senior management and support personnel, and achieving those objectives requires us to maintain a work environment and culture that values diversity. We operate across eighteen countries and are sensitive to the many cultures and backgrounds constituting our employee base. We acknowledge that we, along with the semiconductor and broader technology industry, can do more to advance gender and racial equality by increasing representation of underrepresented minorities as well as females in leadership and technical positions including engineering and other roles.
Of our approximately 1,844 worldwide employees as of December 31, 2022, the majority of employees were from diverse ethnic backgrounds. While that data reflects in part our substantial presence in Asia, even in North America, 52% of our employees with a rank of vice-president or higher and 73% of our employees generally were of diverse ethnicity or were women, compared to 39% and approximately two-thirds, respectively in 2021.
As of December 31, 2022, women represented 17% of our total employees, the majority in engineering. We are an engineering-driven company, and we are proud that women have played a substantial role in designing and developing our products notwithstanding the historical under-representation of women in university engineering departments, particularly in electrical engineering. As of December 31, 2022, we employed 193 women in central engineering functions, representing approximately 14% of our total engineers, up from 133 women representing 12% of our engineer base in 2021. We believe female representation among our engineering staff compares favorably within our industry, but we remain committed to finding rewarding career opportunities for women across all functions within MaxLinear as well as to encouraging the engineering programs from which we recruit to increase their emphasis on opportunities for women. In that regard, we are also proud to have on our board of directors Tsu-Jae King Liu, Ph.D., the first female dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors.
Of our total employee workforce, 17% is represented by Work Councils or collective bargaining agreements in Austria, Germany, and Spain, but all of our employees have freedom of association, or the legal right to join worker organizations, including trade unions, and the right to collective bargaining. The Work Council groups, common to these countries, are comprised of employees elected by the general employee base. We consider our global employee relations to be good. In 2022, our employee voluntary turnover rate was 11%. We host regular global town hall meetings in which all employees are encouraged to submit any question, ahead of or during the meeting, to be addressed by executive and senior management. We also have a formal confidential reporting policy and complaint procedures for employees and others to express concerns about conduct within MaxLinear, which includes confidential hotline reporting available in local languages (https://maxlinear.ethicspoint.com). We are committed to limiting the use of temporary or contract workers to specialized, non-recurring projects or during peak times when permanent employment is scarce, and when we do use contract workers, we make efforts to convert them to permanent employees when they can fulfill open positions. As of December 31, 2022, while all of our employees are considered permanent employees, we utilized contractors for 18% of our workforce and are committed to further reducing our use of such contractors. When needed, we conduct responsible workforce restructuring procedures in compliance with the regulations of the jurisdictions in which we operate.
Employees by country. The following table presents our number of emloyees by country:
| Country | 2022 | 2021 |
| Austria | 92 | 83 |
| Canada | 27 | 21 |
| China | 68 | 64 |
| Republic of Korea | 1 | 1 |
| Germany | 93 | 93 |
| Hong Kong | 1 | 1 |
| India | 431 | 266 |
| Ireland | 1 | 1 |
| Israel | 214 | 174 |
| Italy | 1 | 1 |
| Japan | 3 | 3 |
| Malaysia | 3 | 3 |
| Singapore | 194 | 162 |
| Spain | 124 | 88 |
| Taiwan | 157 | 124 |
| United Kingdom | 3 | 4 |
| United States | 430 | 413 |
| Total | 1,844 | 1,503 |
Our human capital resources objectives include, as applicable, attracting and retaining talented and experienced employees, advisors, and consultants. We utilize multiple online search tools, specialized recruiting firms, employee referral programs and university hires to ensure a varied outreach approach for candidates. We aim to increase our hiring and retention of female talent including direct hires or interns from universities. We offer this via a combination of competitive base salary, time-based equity incentives and bonus plans linked to financial performance that are designed to motivate and reward personnel with annual grants of stock-based and cash-based incentive compensation awards to our employees, some of which vest over a period of four years, plus other benefits, in order to increase stockholder value and the success of our company by motivating such individuals to perform to the best of their abilities and achieve both our short and long-term objectives. We offer competitive benefits tailored to local markets and laws and designed to support employee health, welfare and retirement; examples of such benefits may include hybrid work schedules with one flexible day allowing all employees globally to work from home; paid time off; 401(k), pension or other retirement plans; employee leave to support well-being of employees and their dependents; bereavement leave; employee stock purchase plan; basic and voluntary life, disability and supplemental insurance; medical, dental and vision insurance; health savings and flexible spending accounts; relocation assistance; and employee assistance programs. Our global training and development program includes internal on-the-job training and we have launched a pilot training program which includes seminars, podcasts and recommended learnings under which we have received tremendous employee participation. Our corporate training program, which is mandatory, covers training on discrimination-free workplace, as well as our code of ethics and employee conduct, insider trading policy, global export controls and economic sanctions policy, global anti-bribery and anti-corruption policy, and anti-trust and competition law.
Corporate Governance
We have recently embedded within our corporate governance principles, which are available on our website, our commitment to corporate responsibility initiatives that address environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Our nominating and governance committee has assumed responsibility in its charter for overseeing our ESG initiatives, and we look forward to continued communication to and engagement with stockholders on these matters.
Our business and operations around the world are subject to government regulation at the national, state, provincial, or local level addressing, among other matters, applicable environmental laws; health and safety laws and regulations adopted by government agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; laws relating to export controls and economic sanctions; and the rules of industrial standards bodies such as the International Standards Organization and governmental agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission.
We believe that our properties and operations comply in all material respects with applicable laws protecting the environment and worker health and safety. We do not manufacture our own products but do maintain laboratory space at certain of our facilities to facilitate the development, evaluation, and testing of our products. These laboratories may maintain quantities of hazardous materials. While we believe we are in material compliance with applicable law concerning the safeguarding of these materials and with respect to other matters relating to health, safety, and the environment, the risk of liability relating to hazardous conditions or materials cannot be eliminated completely. To date, we have not incurred significant expenditures relating to environmental compliance at our facilities nor have we experienced any material issues relating to employee health and safety. We cannot provide assurances, however, that issues will not arise in the future or that applicable law will not require us to incur significant compliance expenditures.
In addition to environmental laws, our business is subject to various rules and regulations and other orders relating to export and/or import controls. Certain of our products and technologies are subject to export and/or import controls imposed by countries in which we do business. In certain instances, these regulations may require pre-shipment authorization approval from a government authority; depending on the country and/or individual or entity involved, approval may not be granted. For products subject to the Export Administration Regulations, or EAR, administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), a license may be required, depending on one or more factors including the type of product or technology at issue, the intended end use, the identity of the end user, the identity of other companies involved in the production process, and whether a license exception might apply. Certain of our products and technologies are subject to the EAR. Obtaining export licenses can be difficult, costly and time-consuming and we may not always be successful in obtaining necessary export licenses. Our failure to obtain required import or export approval for our products may adversely affect our business, and other limitations imposed on our ability to export or sell our products may also harm our international and domestic revenue. In addition, it is possible that BIS can revoke licenses that have been granted or decline to re-issue such licenses upon their expiration. Although our policies, controls, and procedures are designed to maintain ongoing compliance with applicable export controls laws, we cannot assure you that we have been or will be at all times in complete compliance with such laws and regulations. For example, our products could be diverted to bad actors. If we violate or fail to comply with any of them, a range of consequences could result, including fines, import/export restrictions, sales limitations, criminal and civil liabilities or other sanctions. In addition, if our customers fail to comply with these regulations and laws, we may be required to suspend sales to these customers, which could damage our reputation and negatively impact our results of operations. The absence of comparable restrictions imposed on competitors based in other countries may adversely affect our competitive position. To the extent that we do business with parties on the Entity List under export licenses, our business could be affected if the government does not grant or renew required licenses. We currently have a license from BIS that permit our transactions with a restricted party, but that license may be revoked at any time or denied for renewal when the license expires.
In September 2022, we self-identified a potential violation of the EAR related to certain transactions with one of our foundry partners in China on the Entity List, or Specific Foundry Partner, in which limited technology in the form of test results and failure analysis reports were furnished to our Specific Foundry Partner without authorization under the EAR. Upon discovery, (1) we took immediate action to remediate, including by preventing recurrence and (2) our Audit Committee engaged outside counsel to conduct a privileged investigation. This investigation has been completed. On March 3, 2023, we submitted a comprehensive voluntary self-disclosure to BIS regarding the potential EAR violation described above and other potential export control violations for which we have taken actions to remediate the infractions. Our voluntary self-disclosure is currently under review at BIS, and it is unknown when such review will be completed.
Contributing to Community and Employee Well-Being
We encourage our employees to contribute to local communities. In 2022, MaxLinear, its directors and employees have raised in excess of $100,000 in donations and goods to charitable organizations. In March 2022, MaxLinear launched a relief effort contribution matching program which matches 100% of employee contributions to three organizations providing humanitarian relief to refugees of the conflict in Ukraine: Doctors without Borders, World Kitchen and Save the Children. Annualy in December, we organize a donation, toys and goods drive to stop the cycle of child abuse and help at-risk youth in the community benefiting Olive Crest, a U.S. child abuse prevention and treatment charitable organization. More recently, in February 2023, MaxLinear launched another relief effort contribution matching program which matches 100% of employee contributions to four organizations providing humanitarian relief to victims of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Northern Syria providing shelter, food, water and medicine: Save the Children, Red Cross, Global Giving and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.
Also in 2022, we have launched efforts and organized events to encourage our employees to participate in volunteerism to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the community, environmental sustainability, and enhance employee well-being. In September 2022, our U.S. offices participated in national clean up day. Annually in April, May and September, we sponsor a team of employees to run in 5K races in southern California and in Canada. Our international offices have hosted an international day of women to promote the study of science, technology, engineering, and math by young women, participated in mentoring and investing in underserved communities, humanitarian aid creating aid packages and food kits, and environmental clean up. We participate in the Singapore Workplace Outreach Wellness (“WOW”) Programme and other fitness and wellness initiatives in our other offices. We also launched a global employee recognition program which allows employees and managers to nominate employees, including those in other departments, for monetary awards and corporate recognition. These programs and efforts are organized locally and monitored and evaluated by our human resources department.
Government Grants
We apply for research and other grants from local governments in the jurisdictions in which we operate to enhance our research and development efforts worldwide. The following are grants we have applied for and began receiving grant monies in the last three years; we currently expect to receive all such grants:
| 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | |
| Tax Authority Austria | In progress | EUR 1,632,943 | EUR 1,099,050 |
| Singapore Economic Development Board | SGD 3,675,818 | SGD 2,098,641 | SGD 1,468,917 |
Political Contributions and Lobbying
MaxLinear has not made any political contributions and does not currently engage in lobbying either directly or through other channels. Our code of ethics and employee conduct prohibits employee political contributions made on behalf of the Company, and consequently, we have no history of political contributions, including support of funding political campaigns or political action committees, or to specific politicians or political parties, in any country or jurisdiction.